Periodically, major scientific and technical changes mandate a reconsideration of literary history. From such a reconsideration comes a new understanding of literary form and at the same time a sense of new emerging forms. The intense exploration of chaos and complexity or non-linear dynamic systems theories since the sixties into all domains of thought has been sufficiently powerful to warrant this review. Henri Poincare, the French mathematician, introduced the first formulas for the mathematical study of non-linear dynamic systems in the 1890s, but there were no computers to test them extensively so the importance of those formulas had to wait. Marcel Proust, however, was on the same wave length, as we shall see, and incorporated the concepts behind the formulas into Remembrance of Things Past, which still ranks as the most unread great work of literature.
Edward Lorenz, one of the first chaos scientists, in his 1993 summation defines "chaos" as referring to processes "that appear to proceed according to chance even though their behavior is in fact determined by precise laws." James Bassingthwaighte, in his 1994 study, succinctly explains the interest of this field of thought, namely, that it permits us to create structures, maps, or patterns of the ever-changing state of a system (vi). It allows us to consider the impact of time simultaneously with physical and spatial characteristics, and is not dependent on knowledge of the conclusion or possession of all the facts in order to discover principles or laws that are universally applicable. Any truly great novelist presenting a unique view of reality can also be said to be in pursuit of such universal laws.
This study of the French novel in particular, with implications for other esthetic forms, examines the application of new evolutionary principles being examined in biology, as well as numerous other scientific fields. Stuart Kauffman's comprehensive theory, elaborated in both general and specific terms in his The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution revolutionizes the basic concept of Darwinian selection with at least two ideas that impact a consideration of esthetic evolution, namely self-organization and feedback. Both of these enrich and alter the concept of evolution founded on the linear one of selection determined by the fittest. As we shall see, the tendency to self-organization may resist mutation of certain forms and feedback further limits linear development, bringing to bear a whole surrounding landscape of elements that may prevent optimization or even change.
Thus the novel, stuck, as Flaubert complained, with the inherent power structures of the societies it wanted to depict, is condemned as an artistic form by the habits of its readers who are continually pulled back into the familiar ways of thinking by that very hierarchically-oriented society on which language itself is dependent for its meaning. Proust clearly depicts the difficulty in assimilating a new idea in a scene where the young narrator has gone to see Berma's (modeled on Sarah Bernhardt's) Phèdre for the second time merely because there was nothing else to do that evening. The first time he had seen it, he had been disappointed in Berma because she had not interpreted the role the way he expected it to be interpreted, the way that was familiar to him. Because he had no expectations the second time, he discovers her real talent, the new way she has of interpreting the role:
It had just occurred to me that if I had not derived any pleasure from my first hearing of Berma, it was because, as earlier still when I used to meet Gilberte in the Champs-Elyséées, I had come to her with too strong a desire. . . . [I]t is the really beautiful works that, if we listen to them with sincerity, must disappoint us most keenly, because in the storehouse of our ideas there is none that corresponds to an individual impression.
All serious art since the 1860s (if not long before) has hoped to change the way men see. D.W. Griffith himself espoused that aim, though Rimbaud had championed it as the basis of his poetry long before: changer la vie (change the world) by a dérèglement de tous les sens (disruption of all the senses) is certainly a movement in the same direction. To do this the novel has increasingly challenged traditional narrational forms in its attempt to escape the prison of language, language that kept communicating the old vision of the world that the novel was trying to explode. Unfortunately, each new attempt has met with increasing incomprehension by readers. If novels of yore are being adapted as films to speak to a public today, they may well embody repetitive phenomena that implicate laws that transcend epochs. But why might the novel possibly be better as film? What is it about film that makes a director take the risk (guaranteed in the case of "great" novels) of criticism for an inferior work? Certainly one reason is the possibility of presenting simultaneously a setting, words, characters, and sounds directly to the spectator. This is the nature of film which gives it an advantage for changing the way the spectator sees. For language alone is bound to the hierarchical social system that generated it. Novels such as Proust's Remembrance of Things Past that tried to use language in such a way to force the reader to think differently have been relegated to the library shelf and are more talked about than read. Heirs of Proust and Joyce, such as Claude Simon and Michel Butor are being relegated to the same dusty shelves. The feedback from the social landscape prevented selection from developing in a fitter or more complex direction. The public retreated to the frozen forms of thought with which it was already familiar, eschewing the effort needed to discover a new way of thinking.
Film, on the other hand, has a freedom that does not bind it in and of itself to language, the moving and sonorous image providing a potential critical force that the novel did not have at its disposition. We shall see that many adaptations fail to realize the potential of the medium, which does not mean it isn't there. On the other hand, as Carolyn Anderson notes in her study of "Film and Literature:" "the novels considered most cinematic (for example, the work of Faulkner and John Dos Passos) are often the most unfilmable" (121). The film adaptations that have captured old masterpieces in a technologically new form will hopefully help improve our understanding of the visual techniques the authors themselves attempted to materialize by means of form or style. By applying chaos and complexity theories to major French novels from the 18th century on that have had good filmic adaptations, this study hopes to discover the development of this new sense of emergent forms as expressed in literature and at the same time consider the relationship of film as an emergent art form compared to the novel as an older expression of order.
Every major novel attacks, criticizes, or ridicules the hierarchical power structure. As Flaubert noted over 130 years ago, that power structure has kept reaffirming itself since the first league formed in the Middle Ages. With each so-called revolution, the power structure returns, with different names at the top and different ones at the bottom, Louis XVIth one day and Marat and Robespierre the next, but still with a hierarchical power structure. Though there are other relationships possible (which are precisely what literature would like to explore), they are not dominant. Literature need only breach the walls of the dominant structure to introduce other possibilities. Since the power structure is the dominant one for Western civilization, the subject isn't important, but how it is treated is, given you can't change the structure unless you change the way people think, i.e., how they think, as most modern artists tend to agree. Current chaos and complexity theories are also interested in the way things or people relate and therefore provide the underpinnings of this reassessment of major French novels: Diderot's The Nun, Choderlos de Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons, Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Zola's Nana, Proust's Swann's Way, Bernanos's Mouchette, and Duras's The Lover. Not all of these works are equal in stature nor are all cinematic renditions of equal value. All, however, have proven cinematic potential, even if the full potential was not realized.
Many adaptations, like some we consider, are totally unremarkable as film but are guaranteed a box-office success because of the reputation of the novel that preceded it. Many people will go just to find out what the novel, which they haven't read, was all about to make sure they "haven't missed anything." As long as the novel told a story, the film, recounting the same thing, will satisfy the large public. This does not satisfy my criterion for "cinematic." When I see such a film, I'm always thinking: "It's still a novel." A large box-office return is rare for something exceptional or new because it is too far removed from the habitual frame of reference of the general populace, too different from the frozen social form of thought, for large numbers of people to appreciate or enjoy it.
Cinematic Defined:
Projecting moving images on the screen does not constitute "cinematic." Quite often such images merely make up a narration. The evolution of the novel toward the cinematic implies the tendency to use techniques that engender a sense of spatial and temporal simultaneity, whether via montage and fragmentation, doublings and parallel editing, flashbacks and metaphors or spatio-temporal enlargement. When a film is cinematic, different things are juxtaposed in such a manner as to suspend the reader's habitual frame of reference and therein engage him or her in a consideration of new relationships. There may be superimposition of the sound track and the visual image, one dialogue but another setting. Of course the film need not intend to suspend judgment, but unless it uses images in this contastive fashion, it is doing no more than a novel: telling a story in a sequential manner with setting reinforcing the words.
"Cinematic" also implies engagement in a present experience. In the traditional novel, the reader knew he would be told a story that had already happened to someone else. Modern novels attempt more and more to make the experience of reading the book the experience the book was about. The reader is, as in the cinema, made a voyeur present at the event, the outcome of which has not yet been determined.
Through fragmentation, novels attempt to achieve cinema's ability to juxtapose causally unrelated images. Such techniques may prove perfectly comprehensible in the novel where the reader has time to mull over them and incomprehensible to a public unfamiliar with the fundamental building blocks of these techniques. Since feedback is culturally dependent, it only makes sense to start such a study with novels of a specific culture. If it works for one art form and one culture, and if the principles are truly valid, they may well be applicable to other cultures as well. As the French novel as well as its cinema are renowned for their success, the French novel, film, and culture seem a valid point of departure. The evolution of the novel toward cinema is significant because it implies a new way of looking at and thinking about the world. At the very least, it is indicative of a search for new ways of viewing the world.
Before considering the evolutionary concepts that explain this development, let's take a quick overview at what major French novels spanning three centuries have achieved to give us some concrete examples with a sense of direction. I shall italicize expressions that are inherent in chaos and complexity theories and shall be elaborated later.
Three Centuries of the French Novel:
The French Revolution precipitated the monarchical order founded on absolute external values into a state of chaos. The scattered factions immediately attempted to found a new order, but as a structure based on relative values, not the absolute ones of Louis XIV and Company. What they re-instituted was always a hierarchical power structure. Each novelist plucks away at this structure, first simply to destroy it, and later suggesting other forms of order by the very form of the critique itself.
Diderot is a good starting point because he was one of the first to conceive of the interrelatedness of the universe as in chaos and complexity theories. In Le Rève de d'Alembert, he compared the world to a cluster of bees where every member moves in conjunction with and is influenced by the acts of others. In The Nun, written in the 1860s, he decries the isolation of individuals in convents or monasteries because it deprives man of feedback found only in the presence of others. He exposed the convent life as leading to folly, insanity, perversion and suicide, similar to the starvation of a cell if isolated from its life-sustaining environment. Other than a verbal critique of isolation, Diderot does not particularly imply any revolution of form in this novel. Jack the Fatalist would be much more interesting in this respect, but only its relatively traditional love story of revenge by Mme. de la Pommeraye has been adapted as film (Bresson's The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne); and that story is so similar to Les Liaisons dangereuses that consideration of the latter will suffice.
Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses demonstrates the weakness of self-identity founded on ones personal ability to manipulate others, for such manipulation is inevitably sensitive to initial conditions. Mme. de Merteuil and Valmont conspire to get revenge on the Count de Gercourt. In the past, Gercourt had taken one of Valmont's mistresses from him and he is currently leaving Mme. de Merteuil to marry a young girl, Cécile, fresh out of the convent. Mme. de Merteuil arranges for Valmont and Cécile to meet, insidiously setting up the latter for a seduction by Valmont. The outcome is not as predicted because of sensitive initial conditions not included in Mme. de Merteuil's and Valmont's calculations. Valmont meets a third and very virtuous woman, Mme. de Tourvel, who is visiting his aunt's country house where Mme. de Merteuil has arranged for him to seduce Cécile. Neither Valmont nor Mme. de Merteuil counted on Valmont having the potential of truly falling in love. Passion decimates the otherwise predetermined, calculated relationships. Valmont and Cécile's true love, Danceny, end up killing one another and all the letters written to Valmont by Mme. de Merteuil conspiring for the fall of Cécile, Mme. de Tourvel and others are made public, causing Mme. de Merteuil's social disgrace. The ultimate destruction of all involved and the self-annihilation that is the result constitute a critique of the hierarchical power structure which fails to be effective even in the hands of the most skilled, as we shall see later. Yet because of the dependency on words and the traditional linear form of the story, many readers are so impressed with Mme. de Merteuil's ability to manipulate others that she remains the "heroine" of the novel. The argument, finally, depends on being able to know ALL the conditions of the situation, something that chaos and complexity theories assure us is not humanly possible.
Stendhal's The Red and the Black can be seen to explore the attempts of the Restoration to use the familiar hierarchical power structure as a means for defining oneself. Julien Sorel by dint of hard study (he memorizes the Bible in Latin) works his way up the social ladder (quite rapidly) going from the son of a provincial sawmill owner to that of the personal secretary for the influential Marquis de La Mole in Paris. Stendhal uses relative rather than absolute values as a basis for self-identity. If birth is not the basis for individual meaning as under the Monarchy, then the individual is free to create his own meaning. But there is great irony in Julien's attempt to ascend the social ladder, for all his efforts are directed toward hobnobbing with the social classes he despises the most. As a consequence, Stendhal shows the Restoration as a weak imitation of the original model, operating at what Kauffman would surely refer to as a lowered fitness level. Sensitive initial conditions easily tear asunder Julien's success just as they did in Laclos. On his way up the ladder, Julien unexpectedly falls in love with Mme. de Rênal, the wife of his first patron. In all Julien's attempts to create and define himself vis-à-vis society, he ignored the power of his feelings. Finally Julien is on the verge of marrying M. de la Mole's daughter and receiving an aristocratic title, M. de la Mole receives a letter defaming Julien as an insidious parvenu, a letter dictated to Mme. de Rênal by a priest scheming for power himself and using Mme. de Rênal's profound sense of religious guilt for leverage. Julien understood too little of Mme. de Rênal's religious feelings to be able to imagine her writing such a letter and charges off on horseback to shoot her while she is praying in the middle of Mass! All comes to nought. Stendhal would not seem to present a much different way of looking at the world from that of Laclos were it not for his heavy irony and the "perpendicular" manner of presenting events instead of the linear one of Laclos. In the Journal Gide kept while writing The Counterfeiters, he noted that in Stendhal, "one sentence never calls for the following nor is born from the preceding one. Each one stands perpendicularly to the fact or idea." Entering a Stendhal novel is more like riding an elevator up a high rise apartment house with stops on numerous floors, different encounters and events occurring depending on the floor, yet no specific causal link connecting them. As a consequence, the reader can never be sure which elements presented are going to play a significant role in the outcome, just as in the dynamic world of life. In Laclos, the reader could track each new development directly. In Stendhal, the simultaneity of apparently unrelated events confused readers for almost a century. They were unable to juggle the multiple events without a clue to their relationship; they were not yet trained to look themselves for the self-similar patterns. Many readers today still have the same problem with Stendhal and all later exploratory literature.
Though inspired by Sade, Flaubert is the first, by the way he juxtaposes scenes, words, points of view, etc., to predicate an order based explicitly on style rather than content, for he thought pittance of the hierarchical power structures, whether religious, political, or romantic that constituted the subject matter of his novels: Madame Bovary, Salammb“, or St. Julien among others. Yet in all his works the style, his manner of organizing the subject is the same, always having the effect of leveling the hierarchical manner of thought. Provincial Emma Bovary's adulterous love affairs in search of a more exciting life to justify her belief in her own superiority over others appeared to Flaubert to be the most common denominator he could find of the hierarchical power structure. He used it to juxtapose numerous other levels of power struggles, demonstrating that the superimposition of one level on the other sufficed to render the hierarchical sense of order sterile. The most famous example of this superimposition is the Agricultural Fair Scene. The town councilor's discourse flattering the farmers for their successful efforts so they will go back and toil the soil harder while the mayor and company live off the taxpayers is intercut with Rodolphe's discourse flattering Emma so she will become his mistress. There is a significant number of readers who can read this passage and fail to see the awards as being made to Rodolphe for his success in farming, cultivation, seduction or whatever and see Rodolphe's seductive phrases as equivalent to the flattery the councilor has made of the social good of the farmers. The triumph of the councilor and Rodolphe over the farmers and Emma, respectively, reads thus:
"Why should we have met? How did it happen? It can only be that something in our particular inclinations made us come closer and closer across the distance that separated us, the way two rivers flow together."He took her hand, and this time she did not withdraw it.
"First prize for all-round farming!" cried the chairman.
"Just this morning, for example, when I came to your house..."
"To Monsieur Bizet of Quincampoix.""Did I have any idea that I'd be coming with you to the show?"
"Seventy francs!"
"A hundred times I was on the point of leaving, and yet I followed you and stayed with you..."
"For the best manures."
"...as I'd stay with you tonight, tomorrow, every day, all my life!"
"To Monsieur Caron, of Argueil, a gold medal!" "Never have I been so utterly charmed by anyone . . ."
"To Monsieur Belot, of Notre-Dame..."
"No, though! Tell me it isn't so! Tell me I'll have a place in your thoughts, in your life!"
"Hogs: a tie!" (167-8)
He has won Emma over and, as Flaubert tells us, "everyone resumed his rank and everything reverted to normal. Masters bullied their servants, the servants beat their cows and their sheep, and the cows and the sheep--indolent in their triumph--moved slowly back to their sheds, their horns decked with the green wreaths that were their trophies" (170). So the prizes have won over the farmers for another year. Flaubert was not taken to court for having criticized the hierarchical power structure, but for insulting the morals of the ordinary French housewife, much to his surprise. Language proved to be so frozen in its cultural context that readers could not comprehend its implications outside that context. They had never considered prizes as a means of seduction. Enough readers comprehended the mockery of the "romantic" expressions; the scene did succeed in laughing the clich‚d expressions out of existence, rendering them generally useless today for purposes of seduction. But prizes are still awarded. The reciprocity of the critique was not comprehended. This scene, probably the most cinematic in all of literature as we shall see, has never been rendered by film in its truly cinematic form. The clich‚ words of amorous seduction do not reflect on the farmers and vice versa so that the reciprocal critique is clear. The film adaptations slavishly imitate Flaubert's literary approximation, showing first Rodolphe and Emma as they say their speeches, then the councilor giving his. We shall look at the scene's cinematic potential later.
Zola provides little new in the form of a critique of the power structure, but his power of description gives the poor, the workman, a place in the global order of evolution. His power of description reveals the force of a crowd, the rallying cry of a mob as having a self-ordering principle impossible to prescribe by law. His narrative, however, remains so highly controlled by linear logic that he succeeds only in empowering the poor, not in challenging the power structure itself. The well-known scene in Germinal where the coal-miners move as one revolutionary mass in revolt against management is one of the most dynamic scenes in literature -- recently rendered quite successfully in Claude Berri's 1993 adaptation -- leaving the reader convinced of the power of the working man. With the working miners in charge and the owners at their mercy, the names of the people in power have changed, but nothing has changed in the fundamental structure of things and the way they relate. Nana, the story of a prostitute who financially ruins every wealthy man she can attract, is worse. She does not pursue power with any social improvement in mind but solely for self-gratification. After she has destroyed the powerful, the only thing Zola can think to do with her, since she is too dumb to rule (something no one would have said of Laclos's Mme. de Merteuil) is to have her contract and die of smallpox, leaving a total void or the Franco-Prussian war, which would historically ruin any of the powerful individuals Nana had missed. Zola's use of violent language merely reinforces the reader's cultural frame of reference based on a hierarchical structure. Yet Zola's novels are considered among the most "cinematic" by numerous individuals, as we shall see. No adaptation, however, has managed to communicate the force of the mob as well as Zola's descriptions do. Yet they seem so visual when read. He offers an excellent example of cinematic literature as opposed to real cinema.
In Remembrance of Things Past, Proust, under the guise of looking for an artistic subject matter, makes the reader discover ways in which he himself can find his own self-defining patterns of behavior and feelings, or, in other words, identify his own strange attractor. What confuses the uninitiated reader is the lack of a subject matter he or she is used to, for Proust is more interested in describing the way the narrator experiences events or encounters them than in the events themselves. The reader without a habit of relating the way his own experiences occur to those of the narrator will never discover that he, himself, is the real subject matter of the book and that his discovery of his own patterns of behavior is what the artistic engagement is all about. For example, the narrator describes the relatively clichéd conversations of different social milieux, first those of the nouveau-riche Verdurin clan, eventually those of the Duchess of Guermantes' parties. The snobbery and pretense of exclusivity, and exclusion of others, is a continual preoccupation. Lest the reader be under the illusion that progress up the social ladder is occurring, Proust topples the entire social hierarchy in the very middle of Remembrance of Things Past in a scene known as the "marquise of the restrooms." The narrator's maid had given the attendant of the restrooms located along the Champs-Elysées the nickname of "marquise" when the narrator was taken to the park to play in his youth. Now the narrator is taking his beloved grandmother, who has been ill, out for some exercise as prescribed by the doctor -- it will be her last promenade. Feeling ill, she heads for the restrooms, followed of course by her grandson and narrator. The park-keeper is chatting with the restroom maid, the "marquise," while the grandmother is inside. The narrator recounts the conversation she would have heard. The "marquise" appellation immediately reminds the reader of the numerous aristocratic salons just frequented with the narrator.
At the entrance, as in those circus booths where the clown, dressed for the ring and smothered in flour, stands at the door and takes the money himself for the seats, the `Marquise,' at the receipt of custom, was still there in her place with her huge, uneven face smeared with a coarse plaster and her little bonnet of red flowers and black lace surmounting her auburn wig. . . .
"So you're still here?" he was saying. "You don't think of retiring?"
"And what have I to retire for, Sir? Will you kindly tell me where I shall be better off than here, where I should live more at my ease, and with every comfort? And then there's all the coming and going, plenty of distraction; my little Paris, I call it; my customers keep me in touch with everything that's going on. Just to give you an example, there's one of them who went out not more than five minutes ago; he's a magistrate, in the very highest position there is. Very well, Sir," she cried with ardour, . . . "for the last eight years, do you follow me, every day God has made, regularly on the stroke of three he's been here, always polite, never saying one word louder than another, never making any mess; and he stays half an hour and more to read his papers and do his little jobs. There was one day he didn't come. I never noticed it at the time, but that evening, all of a sudden I said to myself: `Why, that gentleman never came to-day; perhaps he's dead!' And that gave me a regular turn, you know, because, of course, I get quite fond of people when they behave nicely. And so I was very glad when I saw him come in again next day, and I said to him, I did: `I hope there was nothing wrong yesterday, Sir?' Then he told me that it was his wife that had died, and he'd been so put out, poor gentleman, what with one thing and another, he hadn't been able to come. He had that really sad look, you know, people have when they've been married five-and-twenty years, and then the parting, but he seemed pleased, all the same, to be back here. You could see that all his little habits had been quite upset. I did what I could to make him feel at home. I said to him: `Y' mustn't let go of things, Sir. Just come here the same as before, it will be a little distraction for you in your sorrow.' . . . And besides," she went on, "I choose my customers, I don't let everyone into my little parlours, as I call them. And doesn't the place just look like a parlour with all my flowers? Such friendly customers I have; there's always some one or other brings me a spray of nice lilac, or jessamine, or roses; my favourite flowers, roses are."
The thought that we were perhaps despised by this lady because we never brought any sprays of lilac or fine roses to her bower made me redden, and in the hope of making a bodily escape . . . from an adverse judgment, I moved toward the exit. But it is not always in this world the people who bring us fine roses to whom we are the most friendly, for the `Marquise,' thinking that I was bored, turned to me.
"You wouldn't like me to open a little place for you?"
And on my declining:
"No? You're sure you won't?" she persisted, smiling. "Well, just as you please. You're welcome to it, but I know quite well, not having to pay for a thing won't make you want to do it if you don't want to."
At this moment a shabbily dressed woman hurried into the place who seemed to be feeling precisely the want in question. But she did not belong to the `Marquise's' world, for the latter, with the ferocity of a snob, flung at her:
"I've nothing disengaged, Ma'am."
"Will they be long?" asked the poor lady, reddening beneath the yellow flowers on her hat.
"Well, Ma'am, if you'll take my advice, you'll try somewhere else; you see, there are still these two gentlemen waiting, and I've only one closet; the others are out of order."
"Not much money there," she explained when the other had gone. "It's not the sort we want here, either; they're not clean, don't treat the place with respect, it would be your humble here that would have to spend the next hour cleaning up after her ladyship. I'm not sorry to lose her penny." (The Guermantes Way 220-222).
When the narrator and his grandmother in disarray are a short distance from the pavilion, the grandmother replies to her grandson's inquiry as to how she feels, hiding her malaise with a comment about the conversation overheard: "Could anything have been more typical of the Guermantes, or the Verdurins and their little circle? Heavens, what fine language she put it all in!" (222). The reader cannot possibly miss the similarity between the snobbery found in the social circles of all classes, but now snobbery has been tossed into the toilets of the Champs-Elys‚es, and surely no reader who has gone this far in Proust can be so obtuse as to miss the implication that his or her own social circles are similar, regardless of class. It is very difficult to accord great importance to social "status" after reading Proust, for Proust trains the reader to find parallels in his or her own world while accompanying the narrator in such discoveries in the novel. The habit of finding parallel patterns is the real subject of Remembrance of Things Past -- along with many other principles now found in chaos and complexity theories.
Bernanos as a Catholic writer is more intent on ascertaining the source of order; for him it is God. In a world of conflicts, conflicts that appear as a consequence of the power structure, how can one communicate the epiphanic moments when everything in conflict comes to rest in harmony and which Bernanos would call the divine? In his tragic tales he manages to communicate a feeling of such a state of existence. Bernanos has a talent for taking the trivial, the insignificant, and the ordinary to generate a terrible sense of inner conflict within a character, making the reader suspend judgment when a sense of peace is obtained, usually through death. In Mouchette, we encounter a poor 14 year-old girl whose mother is dying and whose alcoholic father uses her to earn money (though not as a prostitute) for his drinking habits. She is ostracized by all the other members of this community, none of whom are particularly wealthy but who, therefore, seem to take even more pride in being superior in some way to Mouchette. Mouchette's innocence and incomprehension of these injustices drives her to suicide. The reader recognizes quite readily the hierarchical society in which he or she participates and tends to feel embarrassed by the injustices a poor child suffers at its hand. The guilt of the prejudgment falls on the reader. Bernanos communicates at gut level, making us experience the impossibility of ever knowing all the initial conditions and therefore the impossibility of predicting consequences and judging. Bernanos's novels are particularly important because, using modern techniques, they alone, perhaps, have found in Robert Bresson a director capable of faithful adaptations. Though Frear's adaptation of Laclos may well be considered a faithful rendition, Laclos was not using modern fragmentary techniques to communicate, so the challenge is not comparable. Bernanos benefits rather than the contrary. Bernanos was "cinematic" to begin with, in his use of the present tense and the human look used to communicate directly to the reader, two aspects which are not traditional novelistic techniques. Yet Bresson explores additional cinematic techniques capable of communicating mental and emotional states that most would have felt had to be left to the novelist. Whether or not one likes Bernanos's stories, Bresson demonstrates the power of cinema to suspend the viewer's habit of judgment and subsequent categorization by cinematic means, not story-telling.
Finally Marguerite Duras looks to sensory memories as did Proust, for the source of order, to memories that are part of a cultural complex where isolation between different peaks in the cultural landscapes is seen as a major obstacle to achieving optimum performance. In The Lover, the young French girl born and reared in Indo-China in poverty remembers her first lover, an extremely wealthy man of Chinese descent. Poor as her family is, as White colonizers they despise and denigrate the Chinaman as racially inferior. He is totally in love with her, however, and is willing to suffer considerable humiliation to have her, but his dying father, drowned in opium, has arranged a Chinese marriage of families for him and will not listen to his son's pleas for indulgence and a marriage of love. Because of the fragmented manner in which Duras presents the love affair, the reader is always conscious of the huge cultural conflicts as well as the similarity of his or her prejudices. What is fascinating is the ability of a physical passion (and passion is quite physical in Duras, as opposed to Stendhal where it remains psychological or sentimental) to bridge the gap between the high mountain peaks of the different cultural landscapes. Years later and a world apart, the two lovers, now old and with different marriages in their past, contact one another, still feeling the bond between them. And though the prejudice of the two races against one another is definitely present in Jean-Jacques Annaud's cinematic adaptation -- indeed, all the visual drama depends on it -- it appears merely as background for a sensual love story that happened in Indochina. The temporal fragmentation characteristic of the book is gone, replaced by a sequential drama.
Marguerite Duras walked off the set. The film was a great financial success, easily fitting into the familiar hierarchical and Newtonian world of the viewers by pandering to their taste for sex, however so beautifully done. The adaptation is an excellent example of how film is often restrained from developing as an emergent form by the existing frozen forms of social acceptance governed by financial gain, or how a film can transform a cinematic novel expressing an emerging form back into the hierarchical frozen form of thought.
With these concrete examples of novels that have put in question the traditional hierarchical and linear system of thought and the cultural system behind it, let us examine more closely the concepts in chaos and complexity theories that explain the evolution of one form of novel to another, indeed of necessitating a new form if evolution is to continue.
Evolution of an Emerging Order:
The novel and its film adaptations are the perfect genres for studying the evolution of artistic forms, having the advantage over tragedy, for instance, of having no Aristotelian rules to follow--or break. As genres, they are free to adapt and modify old forms. They follow a pattern similar to what biologists know as the Cambrian explosion, a period when multicellular organisms multiplied profusely. During this geologic time there was a sudden burgeoning of complex forms following eon upon eon of sameness. Similarly, the novel came into its prime only after the French Revolution, after centuries of monarchical rule, falling into a vacant ecology, a space where no rules for self-definition had yet developed to replace the social values that collapsed with the Monarchy. There was an initial proliferation of new forms. The 20th century, compared to the 19th, however, has seen few truly new forms of the novel since Proust, Joyce, Kafka and Faulkner. If anything, Michel Butor's evolution toward literature combined with painting and travelogues or Michel Serres exploration of science as literature merely confirm our sense of an evolution toward visual, concrete forms. Film took off in much the same way after World War I, when again, the bourgeois realism of the 19th century met with major disaster, and film forms multiplied. From Lang's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Bu¤uel's surrealist The Golden Age, Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, and Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, anything seemed possible. If at first cinema imitated the narrative style of novels, it soon began to explore domains closed to the latter, namely simultaneity of image and dialogue or sound.
Building Blocks: Novels, and now cinema, use innumerable techniques or building blocks to communicate. But complex adaptive systems, which both man and art forms are, constantly revise and rearrange their building blocks as they gain credibility, that is, as they become familiar. Thus the history of a given form is to some extent that of the building blocks that have been used to generate it. In film, some examples of techniques used as building blocks might include the use of a great line from an old movie in a new context. "Play it, Sam" or "Here's looking at you, kid" evokes the love story of Casablanca. You can't write the line again and have it stand alone; it brings Casablanca with it. Within film, even the name stands for the film rather than the city: Resnais, developing the love story of Hiroshima mon amour in a bar called "Casablanca" doubles his tale, implicating a pattern that goes beyond the one currently told. Another technique involves the use of flashbacks juxtaposed on a current happening. The combination is greater than either of its parts. In the beginning of film you just asked for the story line, though Griffith introduced parallel story lines quite early; today, as in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Red (1994), or Nikita Mikhalkov's Burnt by the Sun (1994), multiple story lines seem almost a necessity. Each building block takes advantage of feedback from neighboring building blocks and learns how to function the most effectively with them. The audience comes to accept the whole packet and then looks for something more complex. Thus, watching 1930s cinema today seems boring because we grasp the effects of elementary building blocks more rapidly. They have become familiar rather than new forms of thought. Laclos' Dangerous Liaisons has undoubtedly had so many modern adaptations because of its multiple love stories intertwined. There are many 18th-century novels with plots demonstrating the control of another's destiny. Diderot's story of Mme. de la Pommeraye's revenge on her lover for infidelity is just such a story, but it's only adaptation in this century is Robert Bresson's 1944 The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne. The elementary linear building block corresponded with the sophistication of the public at the time; the multilinear ones have had greater success since. I mentioned earlier that the structure of Diderot's Jack the Fatalist was more indicative of an emerging form than was The Nun. One reason why it has not yet inspired an adaptation is its very complex multilinearity. Jack's love story runs counter to that of his master, not parallel, and there are 16 other love stories intertwined. This is undoubtedly too high a degree of multilinearity for viewers and another example of a cinematic novel that may not make good cinema. In film, Renoir's Rules of the Game which is certainly multilinear was a flop when produced before WWII but has only grown in popularity since. The public assimilates new building blocks very slowly.
Levels of Complexity: As the public adapts, so do artistic genres. As readers and viewers became more knowledgeable, both the novel and film placed more emphasis on the interaction or participation of the reader/viewer for the generation of its own existence, especially in France. Thus a new art genre is slowly evolving; it is an emergent form. This adaptive process between audience and film, one technique to another, constitutes the essence of art. Creative evolution lies in the journey, the joint adaptation, not in one single work or another. This only makes sense if we talk about techniques, not subject matter. You can't count on the viewer's having seen a particular film, but you can count on his familiarity with certain techniques, which shall have appeared in numerous films or novels. The spectator interacts with the art form in a kind of sexual exchange that results in more complex performers on both sides of the interaction over a period of time. As with children similar to their parents, but different, the improvements whether in public comprehension or in artistic form spread through the population, providing even more complex building blocks. Understanding each level of the building blocks or complexity of techniques permits a better understanding of the next emerging level of complexity.
Techniques can be applied at different costs and a novelist or director may have the financial ability to repeat something that "did not at first succeed" or be appreciated sufficiently by other professionals to be permitted to continue his practice, though the public will not applaud until years later, as was the case with Stendhal or Jean Renoir. We study the latter's techniques today because he spent a lifetime getting them across, one of which was co-adaptation on the set. A "star" used to "make" a film. When Renoir's films first came out, there was no star in them and the public was disappointed. Today many teams are emerging. The same director works often with the same actors and actresses, the same cameraman, composer, etc., even in Hollywood.
If a technique forms a self-consistent pattern, then like certain chromosomes, it can produce new and varied orders. An example of a technique that evolved in response to public acceptance can be found in film in the use of clichéd expressions as dialogue set against the social establishment that perpetuates the clichés. Renoir's Rules of the Game used this technique of juxtaposition to implicate the hierarchical socio-political structure that protected itself from tangling with the German authorities before World War II. Renoir shows the social relationships as superficial and fake, a façade hidden by the clichés known to and used by members of high society to prevent outsiders from disturbing the status quo. It reflected France's and Great Britain's acceptance of the Munich treaty, a treaty with Germany and Italy which permitted Hitler to take over some of Czechoslovakia. The treaty was a flagrant insult to democracy that was justified to the public by those in power with a series of patriotic clichés. The message is clearly stated in the final comment of the film after a scene where the host of the weekend party, de la Chesnaye, has explained the murder of an outsider as "an unfortunate accident" that occurred when his gamekeeper "fired in the course of duty." A guest notes that this is a new definition for an "accident" and is immediately called to order by the old General who finds an equally glib cover-up: "It's just that La Chesnaye has class, and that is becoming rare." The film was banned first by the French government as presenting to the world a demoralizing image of France and later by the Germans during the Occupation. Flaubert, as we have seen in the famous Agricultural Fair scene, had already demonstrated the critical capacity of the juxtaposition of clichés and a social setting that is a recognized cover-up.
The same technique is used in Schindler's List to reveal the same hierarchical power structure that massacred the Jews in World War II. In order to save the Jews, Oskar Schindler had only to use the clichés used by the government to justify what they were doing: bribes in the form of gifts are given as an "expression of gratitude," and the pots and pans his factory will use are "expressly designed for military use;" he claims he is hiring Jews, "they will cost less" than Polish workers; he can't move his factory because that would cause delays and he had "important war contracts to fulfill."
Flaubert was sued for Madame Bovary; Rules of the Game was banned in one nation after another. Finally an Oscar was given for Schindler's List. The example illustrates the power of a particular technique to produce positive feedback in audiences, changing or reflecting its change in thinking. Different orders of complexity are involved in the above example, as well. Madame Bovary used the technique for an imaginary provincial French housewife. Rules of the Game dealt with the upper Parisian social classes, including aristocracy and financiers. Schindler's List dealt with historical fact and the ruling political forces. Thus the patterns generated have become more complex, even though the basic pattern of clichés juxtaposed against hierarchical socio-political structures is ever-present. There is evolution, but it is as much between the technique and the subject matter as it is between the artistic genre and acceptance by the reader/viewer. Just imagine what would have happened to Flaubert had he used the clich‚s set against the historical events of Napoleon III or Louis XVIII instead of a fictional provincial mayor! He most assuredly would not have been charged merely with insulting the morals of the common housewife. Spielberg, on the other hand, received laurels. If military, governmental and political spending in general is now coming under such heavy scrutiny and censorship, is this not in part because the technique has exposed the old order of things and implicated an emerging one?
Coevolution: The novel behaves as a complex adaptive system. In such systems, whether a brain, a society, or an esthetic form, there is no central controlling factor. Any coherent form must come from competition and cooperation among parallel evolving items. Each esthetic form can be said to act like a flock of flying birds, adapting to the forms of its neighbors to become part of the flock, yet competing within it to maintain rank. As a dynamic organism, it cooperates and competes in a dance of coevolution.
More than any other genre, film has relied on competition and cooperation of techniques. Lighting patterns, for instance, must relate to those of dialogue, plot, set, etc., either as contrasts (competition) or correlatives (cooperation) with other techniques. Techniques influence the development of film history in the following way: as a technique becomes perfected, it becomes a fundamental building block for more complex techniques, like neurons in the brain that grow stronger with positive feedback, therein continually reinforcing themselves. At the same time, these techniques are interdependent on one another. Each technique works as part of a team.
Exploitation vs. Exploration: The development of this complexity can also be distinguished as exploitation or exploration. Successful works that merely improve the techniques already there are exploitation. John Holland's classifier system for cells refers to improving what you already have as exploitation learning, or strengthening the connections that have proven successful. On the other hand, exploration learning is linking building blocks that have never been linked before. New works bring new orders of complexity, explore new possibilities. Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, constructed according to principles of non-linear dynamic systems rather than those of traditional Newtonian causal and chronological plot development, is just such a literary exploration.
The film adaptation most likely to approximate Proust's esthetic--the Harold Pinter-Joseph Losey version--could not find funding. The Peter Brooks-Volker Schlondorff version that did materialize is based only on the "traditional" building block represented by Swann in Love that Proust incorporated so he could explore with the rest of the novel. This fact demonstrates just how conservative the flock of cinematic birds is compared to the novelist's world, though one must observe that Proust himself was obliged to pay for the publication of his first volume. Film, then, more than literature, is subject to feedback loops from the spectator for exploitation and exploration. At the same time, it reaches a greater population and therefore may represent greater evolutionary steps than literature could ever foster.
Unpredictability: The meaning of advances is almost impossible to predict, since there is no way to fully assess the previous experience of each viewer which severely conditions the significance a given work has for any given individual. The attempt to understand the techniques of the novel and film and their interactions with readers and viewers does not mean we can hope to predict the direction in which these arts will develop because all the conditions involved in the exploration of new forms and the feedback that will be provided by the public can never be known. We know that the personal, social, and cultural baggage an individual brings to the reading of a text or the viewing of a film will greatly alter the perception, interpretation and reaction.
Chaos recognizes that "small fluctuations may grow and change the overall structure" so that "individual activity is not doomed to insignificance" (Prigogine and Stengers 313). The French mathematician Poincaré wrote early in the century: "It may happen that small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena" and: "A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the latter. Prediction becomes impossible" (68). In accordance with dynamic systems theory, the results always remain unpredictable because of their sensitive dependence on initial conditions, part of which is public response. Iterations and Patterns: The excitement in studying the works comes not from the prediction but from understanding and partaking in the process, in the way it happens. If chaos and complexity theories have been popularized recently by the sciences -- to say nothing of their presence in Jurassic Park, Broadway's Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, and Honda advertisements -- their fundamental focus on how things relate, on the patterns underlying events, have been a central concern of literature since Flaubert and Proust. Following then a well-trodden esthetic path, we propose to follow patterns of literature and film used to communicate to understand a phenomenon in the process of occurring. Just as Feigenbaum and Mandelbrot needed a vast number of reference points plotted before the repetitive patterns became evident in their chaos studies, film as a genre needed to generate a given volume of material before enough examples of filmic techniques existed to warrant a study of repetitions that could be said to be cinematic. Because film has long used adaptations of fiction as a base of departure, adaptations provide another level for studying these patterns. The chaos theory of Feigenbaum mappings and Mandelbrot sets stipulates that the laws for discovering the nature of a given substance, any given novel or film in this case, are the same, regardless of the infinite differences of the individual works considered. In order to change readers's and viewers's visions of reality, the techniques used to communicate a new view must have occurred repeatedly, however different one artist may be from another. Chaos and complexity theories are about how things happen rather than what happened. The first is repetitive and revealing of a law; the second is unique, subject o copyright perhaps, but does not constitute a law.
Strange Attractors: Literary and film techniques behave like a DNA's fractal structure, having "just enough `uniqueness' in the structure of the DNA molecule to pass on crucial information, while at the same time enough redundancy to allow for mistakes to occur without losing effectiveness of the molecule as a storehouse of information." That essential storehouse within each film or novel constitutes the strange attractor which organizes and defines the work. The clichéd dialogue of Schindler's List behaves similarly. Each time the clichéd dialogue reappears, the persecutions of the Jews come back to meet with Oskar's negotiations to make money, ostensibly. As opposed as the two realms are, they come in contact and reach an equilibrium captured in the clichés. Flaubert's use of hierarchical clichés, whether the civic ones seducing the farmers to work harder, the romantic or religious ones seducing Emma, the educational or social ones, all juxtaposed similarly form the core of Madame Bovary -- after all, there are three Madame Bovarys in the novel, and if all submit to the seduction of the clichés, none retraces exactly the same path. As strange attractors the clichés are never exactly the same, never intersecting (Gleick 140), yet they define a specific film or novel, even give it its specificity.
"Dynamical attractors `box' the behavior of a system into small parts of its . . . space of possibilities. Hence attractors literally are most of what a system does" (Kauffman 174). They are sometimes called "strange" attractors because there is no single physical point of equilibrium to which all behavior converges since the behavior is so sensitive to initial conditions. These initial conditions include relationships with all elements of the social landscape with which a subject comes in contact. Flaubert uses the clichés of the hierarchical power structure as the attractor limiting Emma Bovary's possibilities. There is no single cause of Emma's illusions, no single point of no return. Rather, everywhere she turns for help she is confronted by the clichés, boxed in by the clichés of the system itself, every one of which -- whether educational, religious, literary, social, financial, political, medical or romantic -- is attracted to hierarchical power, the source of which continually eludes her. The boundaries of that system none the less box her in.
Fractal or Self-Similar: The problem with using Newtonian physics to comprehend a dynamic system, whether an individual, a culture, or an art form, is the lack of completion. Neither the beginning nor the end is present. All you have to study are fractions or parts thereof. The interesting thing about fractals is their self-similarity. Emma Bovary's romantic illusions are not on the same scale as those of the religious or political systems. Yet in looking at the patterns and strange attractors boxing them into the same system, a self-similarity becomes apparent regardless of the scale of the part studied. "The essential characteristic of fractals is that as finer details are revealed at higher magnifications the form of the details is similar to the whole: there is self-similarity" (Bassingthwaighte 3). A pattern is significant when it can be ascertained at different scales. The scalar nature of anguish in Proust, whether that of a child, a lover, a socialite, or a nation at war, is more indicative of laws of order than those derived from a single impressive event. The Dreyfus trial is not recounted by Proust, though he personally participated quite actively in the defense of Dreyfus. The reactions of people to that event are scalar, however, and those are what Proust describes. They are indicative of changes in the order of the system, something the trial itself would never reveal. Realizing one is studying a fractal and not a complete entity indicates that only scalar elements are significant and non-scalar ones are not. As a result, the heroic acts of Roland, or any individual so important in tales of the Middle Ages, have little significance in themselves in a dynamic world. The mechanisms that produced the battles are much more interesting today, for they reveal a pattern that helps define a dynamic system.
Avalanches and Phase Transitions: Amplifying or otherwise modifying factors in the total landscape will tend to cause cascading bifurcations until suddenly an avalanche occurs breaking loose from the previous order of things. This is known as a phase transition and usually occurs only when a system is operating at its optimum, or, as the saying now goes, on "the edge of chaos," for it is at that point that complex systems "are best able to coordinate complex tasks and evolve in a complex environment" (Kauffman xv). The phenomenon is perhaps best illustrated by Per Bak's image of a sandpile. Once it reaches a maximum height, or its perfect form, additional sand will cause a major avalanche to occur, preceded at first by small bits of sand running off, and then a major cave-in. It is impossible to predict where this collapse will occur, but once it has, the sandpile cannot be reconstructed exactly as it was before the avalanche (Waldrop 304).
Kauffman has argued that once you get beyond a certain threshold of complexity, the old form is transformed into a qualitatively new one, i.e., there is a phase transition. Thus we have seen the disappearance of classical tragedy which necessarily came to an end when the duties proscribed by the Monarchy collapsed. Without a social belief in all-powerful external values, an individual cannot "fail" in his or her fidelity to those values due to some internal fault such as Phèdre's love for Hippolyte. The new hierarchical power structure based on relative values rather than the absolute ones of the Monarchy amounted to a phase transition, an era where the novel would reign since it had no rules. Artistic forms, then, evolve with the socio-political landscape of which they are born. Novels, now films, are expressions of new thresholds of complexity in our civilization.
Critical Limits and Frozen Forms: There are "critical limits to the power of selection: As the entities under selection become progressively more complex, selection becomes less able to avoid the typical features of those systems. . . . Some of the order in organisms may reflect not selection's success, but its failure" (Kauffman xv). The literature of the 18th century reveals just that failure in the monarchical system which had so extensively promulgated islands of power throughout that it could not adapt to any of the innovative solutions provided by the philosophes. The De Gaulle regime was criticized for the same lack of flexibility in the 1960s because it had imposed so much top-down management on the French. Jacques Rivette adapted Diderot's The Nun to criticize that exercise of power as Roger Vadim did Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses.
The fact that the same hierarchical power structure is still the form under attack two centuries later would seem to indicate a frozen form, or as Kauffman states it: "there is a strong tendency in complex systems for selection to be unable to avoid the typical properties of the class of systems in which evolution is occurring" (25). This is confirmed by the artistic form used to criticize the established one. Though Laclos' work is highly critical of the control of others as a means of self-definition, revealing it as ultimately destructive, Laclos is still bound by a relatively linear narrative which itself must be structured hierarchically. The social norm is purveyed in the language, caught in a frozen form. Thus Les Liaisons dangereuses fails to avoid the properties it seeks to criticize. The mitigating element, however, can be found in the epistolary form wherein the interpretation of language is shown to be relative to the reader, the relative points of view introducing conditions which were not initially taken into account and which precipitate Mme. de Merteuil's organized revenge into chaos. Though it may be argued that Laclos suggests a new order, he remains inherently trapped in the form he is criticizing. As a consequence, some readers assume Mme. de Merteuil must be a model to follow because of her ability to control and manipulate others and that her final punishment was merely an attempt on Laclos' behalf to give the novel a moral conclusion. After viewing Frears' film, they remember Glenn Close and are awed by her power to manipulate others; they have forgotten 3 years later why she failed. We shall discuss this further later.
"This frozen component is a first hint of the possibility that in an ecosystem some species may be frozen, while others continue to evolve" (Kauffman 241). Flaubert was so convinced that the traditional narrative form is a product of the power structure that he selected the most banal narrative he could find, that of Madame Bovary, as the subject matter for a literary technique of juxtaposition that implicates quite a different way of thinking, as we have already seen. Great novels criticize the frozen forms of self and social structure so that new forms can develop. Contemporary adaptations of old novels provide us with a historical assessment of those critiques, but also raise the question: Is the cinema attacking the same frozen forms or new ones? And if the latter, what new ways does either the filmic technique or the adapted version bring to the attack and what new, if any, change does it propose that the novel did not? Does the form of the work itself reinforce the frozen component or implicate a new form?
Adaptive Walks: Artists often provide the leaven for adaptive walks, moves that modify the cultural landscape. It can be argued that any truly creative art form provides an opening for a variation or mutation of an existing form. The works we come to consider as "great" are those that have proven, in retrospect, to be valid paths of evolution. This tendency toward exploration can be found in the Romantics' love of the hors-la-loi as a hero just when the bourgeoisie had come into full power. Suddenly a Jean Valjean or a Vautrin was necessary to solve the problems confronting society. Napoleon himself had provided the model, coming from nowhere to crown himself king. Cinema has had similar heroes. In the depression years of the 1930s, actor Jean Gabin played innumerable roles of marginal social characters, isolated islands in the bourgeois hierarchical landscape. The attraction of marginals expresses a fundamental relationship between art and the transgression of frozen forms. As Dudley Andrew notes, during the late 30s "the French believed that their films, like their criminals, were not subject to any rules at all except those that came passionately from within" (229). Criminality, then, is an attempt to express the inherent DNA of a cell, irrespective of neighboring cells, the attempt to assert an individual's expression, regardless of the social factors surrounding him or her. There is a thin line between criminality and art or science.
In a 1929 essay, Eisenstein found his image for the transformation occasioned by the cinematic art in Japanese hieroglyphs: "The point is that the copulation -- perhaps we had better say the combination -- of two hieroglyphs of the simplest series is regarded not as their sum total but as their product, i.e. as a value of another dimension, another degree: each taken separately corresponds to an object but their combination corresponds to a concept" (I, 139). It is not copulation of just any two elements that counts, however, but the combination of these which may conceivably give birth to a new idea.
Vanden Heuvel summarized the problem of modern art similarly when he posed the problem in terms of modern theater: "...how can playwrights, performance artists, and auteurs aid the audience to return to the only slightly more stable macro-world with a sense that what they have seen in the theatre may energize their vision in the world "at large" (258)? If a production, performance, or text reveals the chaotic elements in an existing system and then recuperates them as "elements within evolving (and more complex) representations for knowing the ways of the world," a positive excitement is generated by the work that brings a kind of pleasure to the viewer that engages him creatively in the work viewed or read; his real world is implicated in it (Vanden Heuvel 265-66). We are dealing with Proust's problem of freeing the reader from the familiar so that he can discover something new.
William S. Burroughs's "cut-up technique," collage, montage, or Michel Butor's literary mobiles serve to "eliminate habitual reactions and conditioned reflexes, to separate words from traditional referents, and to question the normal syntax that influences rational behavior" (Tytell 10), in the hope of discovering the germs of a new and more invigorating order. The result of Butor's Mobile certainly makes felt the destruction of bird species and Indians, yet reveals the variety of resources as America's force and key to her vitality. Simply by juxtaposing "facts" and "descriptions" taken from Audubon, history books, automobile catalogs (in the 1950s the U.S. had 1,950 different models of automobiles), Montgomery Ward Catalogue, etc., the reader is plunged into an America where everything is related, where it is not so easy to point fingers at problems and blame them on one individual, race, or culture, where the problems of all the world seem to tumble into one huge pot. Yet the resources combined yield a feeling of strength, of potential that no single, linear expos‚ could engender and still deal with the negatives, the racial prejudice, the annihilation of species that is also part of that history. Art in general allows us to try out adaptive walks, to try something new.
Reader/Viewer Participation: In the 17th and 18th centuries, art forms were considered to be educational, teaching a moral lesson. Much serious art of the 20th-century has been particularly concerned with the participation of the reader or viewer, but the moral lesson is long gone. Without that participation, art remains shear entertainment, escapism. Hollywood, because it is concerned with an economic return on its investment in order to stay in business, has catered to the entertainment side, often to the exclusion of participation. In doing so, it has been very good at exploitation, but not always so good at exploration or adaptive walks. Even Jean Renoir acknowledged, however, that it was necessary to sweeten the pill if one expects the public to swallow the medicine, and he is an established explorer.
Generally, Europe has not been able to compete in the purely entertainment type of film for cost reasons, but has progressed in great leaps of exploration because it is not bound by the studio system of Hollywood. European art in particular deals with medicine, for there is little optimism on a continent that has been plagued by two World Wars and many other conflicts. In order to understand European art, the positivistic American (believing science will eventually come up with a solution for all our problems) must accept a certain degree of nihilism as a given in order to understand what is being attempted. This is not to say that European art has nothing to do with the realities of American life and that it is all nihilistic. French artists in general try to deal with problems on a more moderate scale, probably a more human one than Hollywood does. Hollywood and Texas have conditioned Americans to expect a reality bigger and better than life, a spectacle. But whereas a Hollywood spectacular once was guaranteed the Best Picture Oscar, at the end of the 20th century Howard's End threatened the tradition. Had Steven Spielberg not broken all of Hollywood's rules with Schindler's List (black and white, a documentary-type subject, not "entertainment"), its Oscar runner-up, The Piano, would probably have done the same. America is becoming bored with the frozen forms of entertainment and looks for adaptive walks as more challenging and interesting. The novel before film, began these cinematic adaptive walks.
In our story of the evolution of the novel as an artistic genre its struggle to break the barriers of language, to break out of the frozen cultural forms, has generated new techniques of communication, almost all of which have visual implications. Before looking at authors individually, we need to examine the kinds of techniques found in almost all of them that lead to a concept of "cinematic".
Techniques of Communication:
Frozen forms and cultural prejudices are put in question by any technique that makes it difficult for the reader/viewer to classify or judge in a habitual way. Because most modern artists consider that involving the reader or viewer in the work is the most effective means of changing the way people think, the techniques they use to do so are what can be judged and discussed as successful in leading to change or redundancy.
Fragmentation and Montage: Even in the passive role as observer of a spectacle, the spectator actively participates by constructing a real world based on the fragments of images provided in the film (Cohen 72). The more fragmentary the film, the greater the contrast in the juxtapositions resulting from montage, the greater is the demand on the spectator. The 20th-century novel (as distinct from the novels written in the 20th century using pre-Freudian and pre-Einsteinian worlds) revolts continually against the causal and chronological sequencing of 19th-century fiction, demanding a great deal of participation by the reader. The same distinction can be made between films that imitate theater spectaculars presented in causal and chronological fashion, with "the good" and "the bad" guys and gals clearly defined and leading to a definitive conclusion, and those that leave the spectator with the conclusion dependent on the correspondences he or she has made with the images presented.
In his introduction to a collection of studies on fragmentation in modern art (1981), John Tytell notes:
The fragment became one of the calling cards of the modernist movement, a recognizable, sometimes enigmatic means of creating impact and communicating message, a device that disturbed conventional notions of time and space in literary expression and corresponded to a new sense of the universe that began to emerge as the nineteenth century ended.Einstein, after all, was replacing Aristotle. . . . Continuity in art was a reflection of the nineteenth-century belief in progress and the social Darwinism that implicitly [sic] assumed the superiority of Western technology and religion. . . . But even before the war [WWI], artists were seeing the world differently: Picasso painted Les desmoiselles d'Avignon in 1907, preparing for a cubism that would rupture the consecutive image and confound perspective; . . . the painter Marcel Duchamp, in 1913 (the year of Proust's Du côté de chez Swann and Apollinaire's Alcools, the year when Einstein announced his theory of general relativity and Niels Bohr discovered atomic structure), wrote a musical score called "Musical Erratum," derived from chance arrangements of musical notes picked from a hat and set to the text of the dictionary definition of the verb "to print"; . . . (3-4)
It is not surprising that film, not yet 35 years old, should jump into the surrealist experiments such as Buñuel's Chien andalou in 1929.
In that same year Eisenstein considered that montage derived "from the collision between two shots that are independent of one another" (I, 163). And in 1937 he reaffirmed: "In the unity of that collision is born the true meaning and form of the event or phenomenon" (II, 51). Proust does just this by the use of sensorial images resurfacing in involuntary memory. As a grown young man in Paris on a cold afternoon, the narrator is, contrary to habit, served a cup of tea and a biscuit called a petite madeleine -- an American's equivalent to a cup of coffee and a doughnut. Suddenly he experiences a felicity that evokes his childhood happiness at his great aunt's house in Combray, and all seven volumes of Remembrance of Things Past are the consequence. Juxtaposition can present two opposing things simultaneously, thereby creating a visual metaphor, illustrating the surrealist belief that apparent contradictions between the real and the imagined, the subjective and the objective, can cease to exist. "Spatial distortion, like the negation of temporal linearity, can be considered a residual effect of montage. The compression of time is an inevitable side-effect of any edited jump through space; and, in the same manner, as a result of this seeming ubiquity of the movie camera, two places, miles or even continents apart, can be yoked together and space suddenly shrinks" (Cohen 86). A fragment in itself is not significant. New concepts are born of fractal fragments, meaning fragments demonstrating self-similarity. Proust's discovery of patterns found through leaps in time, juxtaposing past and present rather than using sequential development, revealed the fractal nature of such fragments and makes him a significant figure in 20th century thought.
Doublings and Parallel Editing: Doubles are not usually of the same person or event, but are another way of revealing patterns. An unrelated character does something similar to another. Though non-consequential in relation one to the other, the acts become significant because of their similar patterns of behavior. Swann's love story is relevant to Remembrance of Things Past purely because the anguish Swann experiences when "the creature one adores is in some place of enjoyment where oneself is not and cannot follow" (36) is the same the narrator as a child experienced when his mother remained at the dinner table with guests and he was sent to bed alone. There is NO sequential or causal relationship. But this same anguish will reoccur in the narrator's later loves and be evident in the various social circles where someone is afraid something more interesting is going on in another social circle. The pattern is important; Proust tells the different stories to give the reader the habit of looking for the patterns and the experience of excitement that comes from discovering those patterns oneself.
In cinema, using two stories reflecting or contrasting with one another in form
has been variously called parallel editing, cross-cutting, and (by Metz) "syntagme altern‚." These terms refer to the juxtaposition of two or more spatially noncontiguous sequences by alternating segments cut from each one. . . . Each parallel story acts as a giant metaphor, or analogy, to the other . . . Under ordinary circumstances, cinema cannot, any more than literature, present simultaneously two noncontiguous, noncoterminous events. Parallel editing, however, is the technique that most nearly achieves this effect. (Cohen 86-7)
If the events shown must be sequential, film can simultaneously TALK about one while SHOWing another. In film, D.W. Griffith is generally credited with having been the first to use cross-cutting or jumping back and forth between parallel stories. He in turn claimed to get the idea from Dickens, unless Dickens got it from Balzac. In fact, the technique can be found in much earlier literature as well.
In literature, metaphor quite often serves a similar purpose. One thing is described in the terms of another. Proust will provide us with superb examples, over 4,000 of them by one count. If you try to study one image or theme in Proust, everything else ends up coming with it. Military tactics described by Saint-Loup to the narrator as strategies in love affairs end up bringing not only all the love affairs but the social battles with them as well. We have just seen an example where Proust's involuntary memory brings events totally separated in space and time together to reflect on one another in such a dynamic fashion.
Joyce, in developing stream of consciousness as an analogue to the way we actually perceive and register the world, using an associative flow of objects and ideas that proceeded chaotically, with random and illogical turns, had fashioned a style that fused fragments with poetic effect. . . . Joyce perfected for the novel of sensibility a method of simultaneity, a new way of apprehending the world which would have enormous consequence for the future of fiction. (Tytell 8)
Eisenstein considered it had a major consequence for the concept of montage in general. Both artistic genres, then, can reveal patterns manifested in apparently unrelated phenomena. The prevalence of set pieces, collage composition and repetition in preference to narrative in avant-garde films is indicative of the modern need to explore patterns, as explained by chaos and complexity theories.
Spatio-Temporal Enlargement: The role of the picture frame to engage the participation of the viewer, provoking him or her to complete the picture started within the frame has a long art history. In the twentieth century it is an active and integral part of the picture, inviting us to participate in the game of completion. Cinema, more than any other art, has the ability to project events beyond its visual boundaries by virtue of motion, implying a beginning or continuation of whatever is projected on the screen. It constantly refers to space outside the frame of the picture.
Just as the painters gradually forsook the traditional unique point of view . . . culminating in the unusual encadrages of Degas, so it became clear almost from the beginning that the specificity of cinematic art was arrived at not by recording a stage play but, rather, by choosing that angle of vision by which the moving figure defined most dynamically its field of activity. . . . The power of the movies to present diverse viewpoints of the same object or action brought to an end . . . the reproduction of the "circumscribed space" associated either actually or hypothetically with the stage. (Cohen 40-1)
Spatio-temporal enlargement is part and parcel of the act of reading. Regardless of the amount of description given for a character, each reader will use his own experience and knowledge and project a character of his own conception. Cinematic adaptations inevitably disappoint the reader quite familiar with a novel and his own visions of the characters. No cinematic adaptation has ever dared portray Charles Bovary as the incredible klutz encountered in the opening pages of Madame Bovary. The only French actor who might be able to pull it off is Philippe Noiret. Zola's description of Nana as a seductress so enticing that all of French high society is going bankrupt for her is believable in the novel; every reader imagines a Venus so beautiful. We are totally unconvinced by the Nana of the film. She is flesh and blood and cannot possibly live up to a reader's mental fiction which takes him or her far beyond the limitations of the human body existing in time and space. So both genres have techniques that project the reader beyond the physical reality of the work itself.
Differences in Media:
Various fine studies of literature and film have been done, including George Bluestone's classic one of Novels into Film as well as Robert Richardson's Literature and Film. They do not, however, consider either genre as an evolutionary art form and are therefore considering almost exclusively the representational potential of each medium. Adaptations of novels appreciated by the "Book-of-the-Month Club" are as significant as those of the greatest writers. Gone with the Wind is an outstanding emotive film, but represents at its best the frozen module of hierarchical thought. It is neither a novel nor a film that "explores." Rather, it exploits. The literary works with which we are principally concerned in this study are those which have contributed to the evolution, the mutation, of an artistic form, those which move from a form dealing essentially with subject matter alone to those whose style expresses or implies a different order than the one stated in the subject matter. Only one of the films based on those novels is considered an "exploration" of the cinematic form: Georges Bresson's Mouchette. It is perhaps only fair to consider that the expression of the same story in a different genre is truly a different work and must stand on its own merits. The point of making the comparison with great novels is to learn more about what distinctive traits literature may still have to offer than an attempt to denigrate the films.
Limitations of Verbal and Visual Images: Is the visual moving image a valid basis for the distinction between the genres? There is no filmic equivalent of the famous carriage ride of Madame Bovary and Leon, to date. Chabrol's brief version doesn't come close to the literary accomplishment. The scene is famous because, though the reader knows Emma and Leon are making love in the carriage, there are no words about love in the passage, no description of the inside of the carriage, only the itinerary that it takes rolling around town and the driver's reaction to orders to "keep going." Flaubert communicates the certainty of the love-making by playing upon the intonation pattern of the French language. In doing so, he evokes the entire progression of the love act, the rhythm of the phrase becoming more and more rapid, reaching an orgasm, then withdrawal. Not only is the passage untranslatable as film, but into English as well, for the intonation pattern of the English language is the opposite of French. Whereas the French tend to raise the voice at a comma, English tends to drop it. If you read the English with the reversed intonation pattern, you get the same sexual rhythm as in French:
But suddenly it rushed off through Quatre-Mares, Sotteville, the Grande-Chauss‚e, the Rue d'Elbeuf, and made its third stop--this time at the Jardin des Plantes.
"Drive on!" cried the voice, more furiously.
And abruptly starting off again it went through Saint-Sever, along the Quai des Curandiers and the Quai aux Meules, recrossed the bridge, crossed the Place du Champ-de-Mars and continued on behind the garden of the hospital, where old men in black jackets were strolling in the sun on a terrace green with ivy. It went up the Boulevard Bouvreuil, along the Boulevard Cauchoise, and traversed Mont-Riboudet as far as the hill at Deville. (278)
This is just a small portion of the scene, but reading it with the French intonation will illustrate the point. Only the readers knowledgeable in the techniques of literature realize the source of their certitude that Leon and Emma are making love inside the carriage. You can't prove that that is what happens without explaining the intonation pattern of the French language and what it accomplishes in this passage. A. A. Mendilow in his study of Time and the Novel maintained: "Language cannot convey non-verbal experience." Flaubert defied that assumption in the carriage ride scene, not by verbally describing it, but by the way he uses the words. Cinema has not managed to capture the sensuality of the literary scene visually at all. But Mendilow is fundamentally correct: the words and the grammatical conveyance of their meaning are tied to the frozen forms of the social customs that gave them meaning in the first place. This explains once again that the techniques invented to "rearrange" them are more indicative of new thought or a new system of order than that expressed as subject matter.
The visual image itself can be used in such a way as to replace all sorts of literary techniques, but sometimes the visual image communicates so much more than words that it destroys a more subtle and engaging effect achieved through words. One American director, Kevin Costner, undoubtedly inspired by Flaubert's carriage ride, attempts a montage in No Way Out, cutting between sex scenes inside the taxi and external shots of phallic Washington monuments. Costner may well have wanted to show how crass Washington politics are; he is well served. There was nothing crass about the verbal rendition of the scene in Flaubert.
On the other hand, the visual image may communicate instantly what an author spent numerous pages trying to accomplish with words; such is certainly the case when Julien Sorel arrives at the Rˆnal household. It took chapters for Stendhal to convince us of Julien's hopelessly boring life as well as that of Mme. de Rênal, stuck with a boorish parvenu in a conventional arranged marriage. All that preparation was necessary in the novel to make their instant attraction to one another comprehensible to the reader. The settings and characters we meet them with in the beginning tell us all visually in a few moments. We need no further explanation.
Tytell notes that Ezra Pound's poetry and concept of image as "objective correlative" freed it from narrative, created it as an independent fragment
because it is only part of an unexplained whole, but it appears in the poem as a fragmenting interruption, almost a digression like the unanswered and unposed overwhelming question that also periodically intrudes to perplex the action. This kind of intrusion was to become practically a principle of violation by the time of The Waste Land, where images, ideas, snatches of conversation, and allusions are introduced only to precipitously give way to others, apparently unrelated, all presented without the destination and order afforded by a unified story. (6)
Zola's descriptions of crowds that are inevitably more dynamic, more spectacular than they are when shown in film, defy limitations placed on verbal images. Yet film is supposed to be the medium of the "spectacular." Generalities as to the differences in the genres can be made, but exceptions abound.
Narrative:
1. Linearity of cause and effect within an overall trajectory of enigma-resolution.
2. A high degree of narrative closure.
3. A fictional world governed by spatial and temporal verisimilitude.
4. Centrality of the narrative agency of psychologically-rounded characters.
In other words, it coincides perfectly with the frozen form of the hierarchical structure. And, she adds, "any consideration of alternatives to classic narrative cinema demands a prior examination of the question of narrative structure" (216). This mise-en-question is exactly what evolutionary forms of the novel and cinema try to do. Kuhn notes what I could call a phase transition occurring in film: "A qualitative shift from dominant to alternative forms of narrative cinema may be said to take place when the underlying narrative structure no longer conforms to the classic model" (216), or, in terms of chaos and complexity theories, when adaptive walks have successfully challenged the frozen form. David Cook, in his book on the History of Narrative Film is obliged to preface his entire study with the statement: "Many of the greatest films ever made were created by artists seeking to break the constraints of [narrative] form . . . and there is much evidence to suggest that since the 1950's the cinema has been moving in an increasingly non-narrative direction." Unfortunately, they miss the regenerative and positive force that the exploration of the cinematic form offers. In France, narrative that is mere action is considered so shallow as to be worthless. There the depiction of milieu and exploration of characters and their interaction is the essence of narrative (Crisp 297).
Narrative is a powerful perpetrator of our civilization's most pervasive frozen form as noted above, that of the hierarchical power structure. Its basic unit, Argyros notes, is "the causal frame: actor--action--object. The essential feature of narrative is that it maps the world causally," nesting causal substructures within the general linear sequence (310). What is truly significant about this tendency to organize events in this fashion is the underlying tendency of humans to organize experience. I should postulate that the great narratives found in the 19th century, such as Stendhal's, Balzac's, Flaubert's, and Zola's, are great by virtue of the techniques they bring to the organization of a literary work that differ from the linear, causal ones that constitute the apparent story or subject matter. Stendhal's manner of telling a story is perpendicular, not linear. His irony continually undermines any causality in the narrative. Balzac's concept of the Human Comedy with its interpenetrating worlds was what inspired Proust, not his causally-constructed plots. Zola's poetic force made the role of objects as communicative devices clear to the literary world; it was not his naturalistic theory of milieu and heredity that interested it.
Still, narrative is such a powerful form that it acts as a critical limit, hindering evolution. "Narrativity is the most solid median link between novel and cinema, the most pervasive tendency of both verbal and visual languages. In both novel and cinema, groups of signs, be they literary or visual signs, are apprehended consecutively through time" (Cohen 92). Modern experimenters such as Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Robbe-Grillet have attempted to destroy their narrative by using the camera to stress the individuality of the shot. As Michel Butor noted in Frontières, juxtaposition of diverse elements within the same sentence -- and James Joyce was famous for doing it within the same word -- creates "a sort of talisman which will permit the reader to travel very quickly in space and in time. . . . Within these little texts one travels as if inside little rockets!" (53-4). Thus a different organization has much greater potential for innovation than does the traditional narrative one of literature, even in literature. What the evolved novel and cinema have in common is not so much narrative as the voyeuristic nature of both. Though cinematic actors pretend not to know they are being watched, much more than in theater, in both the novel and cinema, the reader/viewer has the feeling of a fly on the wall, a voyeur. This implies that both genres inspire an intimacy not found in other genres, even the theater where the physical stage acts as a constant reminder of the theatrical pretense.
Continuity vs. Discontinuity: Both the novel and the cinema can combine the real and the unreal to provoke the participant's imaginary and reflective faculties. The cinema, however, must hold the spectator captive until the end of the projection before it releases its public to its own reflections. The novel expects the reader to become engaged at any time, delaying further reading as he or she wishes and indulging in his or her own fantasies at any point, then to rejoin the novelistic adventure at his or her own pleasure. In this respect, too, the novel permits the reader more on-going personal involvement and simultaneous creative participation than does the cinema, the latter demanding the spectator's continued presence with little time to wander. The spectator has no control over the time allotted for his or her participation -- unless, of course, the film is seen on home video...
In a world where speed accomplishes things, where active people are involved in a number of things, where both parents have careers and bring up children at the same time, film being fast and visual often fills the gap that allows for a couple of hours relaxation, but it isn't intended to stop for two hours. A novel is a sustained form of relaxation, something one turns to from time to time for a few moments or an hour, for a plane flight, or waiting in line. It is accessible, portable, and need not be continuously pursued.
Signifier vs. Signified: Whereas the mental image generated by a novel's description is always totally dependent on the reader's frame of reference, the cinematic image tends to take precedence over our own mental images. Whereas the written language separates the signifier from the signified, the visual image renders them simultaneous; whereas the word "tree" evokes different images in the minds of different readers, the filmic image imposes the same mental image on every spectator (Cohen 89).
The biggest difference, then, between the two genres is undoubtedly the fact that in literature of any kind the signifier and the signified are distinct. The word and the object it refers to are separate. What one reader envisions as a "house" is quite different from another reader's image, regardless of the descriptive detail accompanying it. In film the two are simultaneous. All viewers see the same house. By virtue of this distinction alone, the novel leaves a lot more space for the reader's imagination and personal history to enter into the aesthetic experience. It is perhaps the essence of the novel to generate a world that is first internalized for the reader, and ultimately comes forth from his own imagination. The cinematic world is always imposed externally by the visual image. The latitude left to the reader to visualize literary tropes, dreams, and memories as part of his own experience is denied by the visual image. If the cinema is to engage the spectator personally in a new world, it can do it only in the way those images are juxtaposed.
Character: Whereas psychological interiority is considered more easily communicated in the novel by description and commentary, techniques such as lighting and editing can do the same in film. Psychology itself, then, does not distinguish the genres, but the techniques used to communicate it do. Novels must generate their own characters; film has a character already delineated at the moment an actor appears on the screen, and the audiences' familiarity with the persona of that actor will heavily influence interpretation from the very start. In France, however, sets and milieu are considered more significant than the actor, the representation of society more important than the individual. As a consequence, the performers in a French film are often not "star" material and do not carry as heavy a persona with them as do Hollywood actors.
By far the biggest difference in characters belonging to novels and those in films is the one inherent in the visual image. It makes the character tangible, so to speak, frozen visually. In the novel, each reader can create his own image of that character using his familiar frames of reference. The character is always as he or she imagined. The reader no longer has that freedom once the film has been seen. Julien Sorel will always look like G‚rard Philippe, the actor. After seeing his cinematic incarnation, it is extremely difficult to envision a Julien that is the "small, weak-looking young man" with "dark brown hair, growing very low" that "gave him a narrow forehead, and in moments of anger, a wicked look" and who is "despised by everyone as a weakling" (27-8) as depicted by Stendhal. We are far from an Adonis. Americans enthralled with Sylvester Stallones will hardly find Gérard Philippe a dream, but he was the heart throb of the French during his lifetime, certainly no where near the almost puny character Stendhal hands us.
Time in the Novel versus Present in Film: Alain Robbe-Grillet has said: "What interest me are the possibilities . . . of putting on the same level the past, the present, the future, the imaginary, etc. Any other process that tries to reestablish temporality is a process that reveals a nostalgia for literature, since literature possesses the entire range of grammatical tenses" (Fragola and Smith 149).
Each shot in a movie seems to be given in the present tense: in spite of the effects of flashbacks and jumps forward in time, it is inscribed in a here and now that seems capable of being brought back at a moment's notice . . . In passing from one action to another action that we know is diegetically prior to the first, the continuous present is preserved and we have the sense of moving through a medium that no longer has the indomitable forward movement that characterizes chronological time. (Cohen 66)
Yet the intermingling of two separate events have become common practice in both the novel and the cinema, demonstrating that the chronological sequencing is a matter of reader or spectator education rather than inherent in the genre. The use of flashbacks and juxtaposition of simultaneous events permit film to manipulate time, and the novel, according to Joseph Frank, achieves "spatial form" doing the same thing. Proust in particular has proven the ability of literature to generate moments of "time" or space that are free of linear development. Simultaneity in literature, however, was prevalent in the 18th-century epistolary novel and received accolades in Flaubert's Agricultural Fair Scene in Madame Bovary.
Events that occurred before the main actions of the plot can only be presented in film via flashbacks or with a voice-over commentary. Novelistic description, however, tends to be atemporal if the author-narrator (as opposed to an evolving character) does the describing (Chatman 4). This atemporality is difficult to achieve in cinema. An impersonal voice-over may be the only way. Anything the camera shows us tends to be interpreted by us as a setting for the plot we are watching. The discontinuity of chronological time has come to characterize the modern novel, but whether as a consequence of cinematic montage or as a literary development of Flaubert's Agricultural Fair scene among others would be impossible to determine, both contributing feedback to the esthetic form. Both coincide with the complexity that knowledge has achieved in the 20th-century. Nonetheless, the novel most assuredly allows the reader the leisure to reflect on references, past and present, even projecting them into the future or his own life, whereas film forces the viewer, by virtue of consecutive images, to pursue what is currently on the screen.
Eisenstein taught cinema that it could expand time as well as contract it. By sequencing a series of shots of the same action (such as the plate breaking in Battleship Potemkin), making a single action bigger than life and more symbolic. The novel of course can do this descriptively. Again, the technique makes the distinction, not the use of time itself. Temporality can also be exploited by changing the camera point of view of the same subject many times. This can be done almost instantaneously in cinema, making the moment seem bigger, more momentous, and often chaotic. Literature must take the time to describe each new point of view and the character recounting it, often diminishing the focus on the incident itself. So temporality is not easily used as a distinguishing criteria, being dependent on the technique used by the author or director to communicate it.
In Summary: Novel versus Film:
Video "delivers emotion." Novels deal with tenses or time and film deals with space or light. Yet Claude Simon has rendered the novel present by his use of the present participle. Are his novels any more cinematic? Are there techniques in one genre that achieve the same effects as the other? What are the technical limitations and their effects? Why does one read, vs. why does one go to the cinema? What should you expect or not expect, legitimately? As Robin Wood has said, "An attempt to `translate' a great author's creativity into another medium almost invariably kills it; the only sound criterion is the degree to which the film-maker has been able to make the material his own, the medium for his own creativity" (Wood 75-6)
Reasons for Adaptations: In considering film adaptations of great literary works, two questions seem paramount. Why do an adaptation at all if you already have the literary work? When it is a work of literature published only a few years before the film, the major justification is reaching a larger audience. Such was undeniably the case of Schindler's List -- the hope that more people would remember the holocaust if the novel were turned into a film. But when a well-known novel more than half a century old is adapted, the criticism that will abound from the omissions necessitated by the time factor makes it very difficult to claim general viewing as its major justification. Adapting a great novel is rather a challenge that a serious cinematographer likes to undertake almost as a test of his talent, and only a very good cinematographer will attempt such adaptations. Often there are other characteristics about the work that the cinematographer wants to use in order to communicate a feeling or thought that permeates most of his other work or seems appropriate for the times. Quite often the adaptation, then, reinterprets a work in a modern way, making it speak to a different generation than it did originally. It is a work "inspired by" rather than an attempt at a rendition of the original.
Novels that have had modern cinematic adaptations are significant because an adaptation is, itself, a repetition. Repetition itself is indicative of patterns. If they have occurred over two or three centuries, then there may well be a potential law worthy of note, one hidden in the day to day sequential temporality of events. Chaos and complexity theories have taught us to look for patterns as significant indicators of order.
The real advances, none the less, are found in the connections, or synapses in the artistic work, not in the nodes or neurons. In literature and film, connections are comprised of forms or techniques rather than the plot or subject matter which is equivalent to nodes or neurons in a biological system. The best works are those at "the edge of chaos," complex ones where the components of the work never lock into place, yet never dissolve into chaos either. "These are the systems that are both stable enough to store information, and yet evanescent enough to transmit it. These are the systems that can be organized to perform complex computations, to react to the world, to be spontaneous, adaptive, and alive" (Langton summarized by Waldrop 293).
In the chapters that follow we shall examine these patterns and the different ways in which they are expressed. In our brief overview we have noted that, to escape from the frozen forms of language that can do nothing but perpetuate the hierarchical power system of which they are born, the novel has developed more and more techniques to distort, disrupt, and challenge the language pattern in attempts to change a way of thinking, in attempts to foster new ideas with which we were not already familiar, hopefully allowing us to evolve, to generate even newer forms of order. A brief overview of those techniques has demonstrated why the novel as a genre has evolved toward cinematic form: the nature of montage permits cinema to escape from the linear world and by juxtaposition of images and words, permit one a simultaneous critique of the other that suspends the viewer's judgment, permitting him to seek different patterns of organization than those to which he or she is accustomed.
Today the reader may well think of the novel as a form that paints pictures of a given society, a milieu. We forget that the 17th and most 18th century novels contained little description. Then the reader was only told what happened, what was said, who said it, and who the person was. Only with the 19th century, when the novel was attempting to explore the new realm of relative values based on individual feelings rather than the logic of absolute social values, did the artist find it necessary to describe a setting so that the reader could begin to understand the individual's relationships to a relative world. As the novelists pushed past descriptions to structural organization and juxtaposition of conflicting phrases to break free of frozen forms, cinema was invented, making the visualization of such juxtapositions even more dramatic, more effective.
In exploring how these techniques developed and how they are reiterated, we hope to discover clues to the evolutionary forces at work, if not on our civilization in general, at least on the form of the novel. Given the scalar nature of dynamic systems, however, perhaps they are valid for both.
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